Shortly after Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Intrepid,
flagship of the Universal Union fleet in John Scalzi’s Redshirts,
he comes to several realizations about life.
Unfortunately, his realization is that ensigns who are assigned to
travel down to planets with officers have a life expectancy that can be
summed up by Thomas Hobbes’s description: “poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.” As any good protagonist would, Dahl and his fellow ensigns try
to make sense of their apparent existence-as-cannon-fodder.
Scalzi has taken the trope of the redshirt, the
previously unseen character in an episode of Star
Trek whose sole purpose is to die and has more fun with it than any
author since Douglas Adams asked his audience to empathize with a doomed
whale in The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy. Dahl and his mates rapidly realize that while things aboard the Intrepid
can appear normal, there are times when things go haywire, with the officers
acting irrationally and overly heroic, and danger coming from all sides in
some inane ways. They are guided
in their investigations by Jenkins, a strange figure who skulks within the
walls of the ship, reminiscent of Laszlo from the film Real
Genius.
In fact, part of the fun is the variety of homages
Scalzi includes to television and film, pointing out their clichés and
inanities which are introduced not for any logical reason, but to provide a
cliffhanger, much like Gwen DeMarco deploring that “This episode was badly
written!” However, while others have pointed out the ridiculousness of the
genre, Scalzi’s novel is not redundant, bringing its own loving parody to
the unrealistic situations the crew finds themselves in and they struggle
for life, knowing that some force, which Jenkins calls “The Narrative”
has specifically targeted them.
The key to the novel’s success is that Scalzi isn’t
attacking a genre that he doesn’t care about.
He understands science fiction, in its written and cinematic form.
He has worked on a television show and has some idea about what goes
on behind the scenes and how decisions are made.
He knows the history of the genre, not just the Star
Treks and Isaac Asimovs, but the lesser known works. All of that gives Redshirts
an heart that is missing from many parodies and satires where the
authors sees the easy targets, but doesn’t actually understand their
appeal. The situations and humor
in Redshirts is the
nudge-and-a-wink from a fellow conspirator, not the condescension of an
outsider.
Not only does Redshirts work as a novel, but
Scalzi is able to make the characters come alive.
When his primary narrative ends more than a hundred pages before the
end of the book, he is able to turn his attention to secondary characters
and make them as real as the protagonist who drove the first two-thirds of
the novel. Although this aspect of the book shouldn't work, Scalzi manages
to make it work, partly because Redshirts offers a fair amount of
acknowledged absurdity from its first pages, but mostly because Scalzi makes
his characters real, especially when the material says the characters should
merely be two-dimensional.
